Remember! Blog posts don’t just have to be words. Animations, videos, audio, photos and infographics are just some of the media that can be used to create compelling posts that customers will love – and love to share.

Publishing useful blog posts has three key benefits:

• It enables you to make your website the ‘go-to’ place for your customers to get reliable advice and information. Provided that your posts are genuinely useful and reliable and in no way sales-oriented, this can boost your credibility, authority and popularity – and attract both new and existing customers to your site. (More about this in in Social media below.)
• People love sharing great content that they find online.
• And Google loves to see frequent, new, high quality content too. The words ‘frequent’, ‘new’ and ‘high quality’ are all vital. Get this right and it will help to boost – and maintain – your ranking on the search engine pages. There’s a lot said about what ‘getting it right’ with SEO entails – some sense and some nonsense.

We can give you a blogging plan that fits within your marketing strategy – to save you trying to work out what you can usefully blog about each time you sit down to create a post (or worse, never getting around to creating any). Or we can write, create – and upload – your posts for you.

Effective commercial use of social media:

• an be spontaneous
• has to be frequent
• offers fantastic opportunities for interacting with your market
• must be consistent with your brand identity
• can give you useful insights into what your customers are thinking
• can be used to attract new visitors to your website by alerting people to your blog posts, and
• can boost your ranking on the search engine pages.

Different platforms work best for different businesses. It’s a case of ‘birds of a feather flocking together’: different customer types hang out on different social media. And, as all social media is potentially time-consuming, the choice of where best to focus your efforts can be bewildering. It’s therefore essential for your social media strategy to have a clearly defined role within your overall marketing strategy. This is something we do as part of devising your marketing strategy.

We can also help you with:

• the setting up your social media accounts – including the writing of your profiles
• the creation of content (such as podcasts and YouTube videos) that you want to post …

… And we give you as much support as you require by way of guidelines for effective posting.

Done right, digital advertising campaigns can be a highly cost- and time-efficient way of attracting new customers to your business. Done wrong (as they often are), they rank alongside taking up offers made by cold-callers desperate to sell advertising space in glossy magazines in terms of their potential to guzzle your marketing budget for little or no return.

The biggest player in the digital advertising world is, of course, Google Adwords. We devise creative ads – and set up and manage Google Adwords campaigns to attract people to your website when they search for what you offer. The key to success is in the monitoring: we do this for you so that you can calculate the cost of acquiring new customers and are always in control.

Google Adwords is not your only option. We also run campaigns using Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Effective email marketing is all about reaching the right people with the right message. The keys to success are to:

• build your list without annoying people – so that you’re emailing people you’ve got ‘permission’ to email and who are happy to hear from you
• manage your list efficiently and in accordance with the Data Protection Act
• plan your email campaigns, newsletters and press releases (as part of your overall marketing strategy)
• aim to give away as much valuable information as you possibly can: the more useful and valuable what you are giving away, the happier people are to see you in their inbox
• write subject lines that encourage people to ‘open’ and don’t get trapped by their spam filter
• write clear, engaging messages – in a tone of voice that’s consistent with your brand identity
• ensure that your emails, newsletters and online press releases look good – and in keeping with your brand identity
• include appropriate calls to action, and
• be clear about how recipients can unsubscribe.

And then measure results – and use your findings for future emails . How many people opened your message? How many bounced? Who clicked on the links you put in the email (to your website, for example)?

We help you build your list (with incentives and sign-up forms etc) as part of creating your website. And your email strategy is part of your overall marketing strategy. We can also:

• plan individual email campaigns
• design email, newsletter and press release templates that are consistent with your brand identity
• write your emails, newsletters and press releases, and
• send out your emails for you.

Direct mail gets a bad rap because of all the junk mail that lands on people’s doormats. BUT there are ways of making direct mail play an extremely effective role in your marketing strategy. And we will help you with these.

We can help you with all the marketing materials you need for events, presentations, networking and conferences.